Email Marketing: My Lightbulb Moment | iContact

As a rookie marketing guy, email was always on my radar, but I never really took full advantage of the medium. At the time I thought of it as a cheap and cheerful marketing technology and, like many of my industry peers, I simply played with it, sending the occasional newsletter or poorly targeted promotional campaign. Instead, I would focus my time and effort (and considerable amounts of money) on paid advertising, direct mail, trade shows, etc.

Back in the day, marketing was difficult. Money was tight and leads were hard to come by. Then I was set a real challenge.

The economy had come off the rails and the big boss at the company I worked for at the time told me that a regular marketing event hosted in London (the biggest thing we did all year) could no longer be considered as a marketing expense. In fact, the event would not only have to cover its costs, it would have to make a profit and generate a ton of leads for the business as well. If I could make this happen, I’d be royally rewarded. If not … well, we’d talk about that after the event.

After some quick calculations, adding up the cost of a venue, speaker fees, AV costs, catering, etc., etc., I realized my marketing budget for the event would be extremely limited.

I couldn’t afford expensive mail shots, press advertising or any of the other fancy tactics we’d employed in previous years. I was also very conscious of the fact that our sales team were too busy trying to hit their own targets to worry about marketing’s annual shindig.

I would have to fall back on the goodwill of a handful of journalist friends, the corporate blog and good old email marketing to get the message out (this pre-dated social media).

If I was to save the event (and my job), I knew I would have to get strategic.

First Steps

I segmented my list into five groups.

Customers who had previously attended our events

Customers who had not previously attended our events

Prospects who had previously attended our events

Prospects who had not previously attended our events

Partners

They each received a targeted message (essentially the same campaign with a couple of tweaks to reflect their relationship with the company) promoting the event and offering an early-bird discount if they booked in a timely fashion. The email to partner organizations also included some details regarding sponsorship opportunities.

I scheduled the campaigns to be sent at 9.30 am on a Tuesday. My first ticket sale was generated at 9.42 am, with a real flurry of activity over the next 30 minutes.

By the end of the day, we’d sold more than 30 tickets, received multiple requests for more information and had started some very positive conversations regarding event sponsorship.

While I had previously seen email driving whitepaper downloads and webinar registrations, I never really considered it was robust enough to drive sales without any human engagement (I realize how foolish this sounds now).

What really astounded me was the fact that it was all so transparent. I could see who had opened each email, who had clicked on each link and who had gone on to purchase a ticket. This gave me all the data I need to build future, laser-focused campaigns and ensure I wasn’t being over-aggressive and preaching to the converted.

My Lightbulb Moment

That was my lightbulb moment. In the space of a couple of hours, I quickly learned that email marketing was not something you did out of habit or to support other marketing strategies. It was, if carefully managed, the basis of your entire marketing strategy – with other mediums (if required at all) playing support.

Following this moment of enlightenment, I have since looked to email first to solve any number of marketing problems. As the years went by, my email campaigns became stronger, more focused and enhanced by social media and other content marketing efforts while, for me, more expensive, less effective strategies went out the window.

Now, email is a vital component of everything I do in marketing, and while I am very happy to experiment with anything new that comes along (within reason), I cannot see email being replaced as my #1 marketing method of choice anytime soon.

Have you had an email marketing lightbulb moment? Share your story below: